The single most important reason for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed was his initiative last year to make peace with Eritrea. This is an occasion to reflect on the question, does Africa need more inter-state peacemaking? The answer is, yes it should. The Nobel award should alert policymakers to […]
Continue Reading →It’s rare in political science to be able to say, authoritatively, that an extensive sub-field of study has been operating under a false assumption, and that there’s an adjacent sub-field that has been almost entirely neglected. But this is the case with civil war and transnational/inter-state war in Africa. A Google Scholar search for the […]
Continue Reading →From the end of the Cold War until the mid 2,000’s, there had been a downward trend in the number of conflicts and conflict-related deaths. Alex de Waal’s concept of ‘famine crimes’ represents a singular and significant attempt to understand the reversal we are now seeing.[1] In drawing our attention to the procedural […]
Continue Reading →Starvation isn’t at the core of these malign political developments. But it’s clear that xenophobia, corruption and dishonesty are the enemies of humanitarian action and advocacy in the short term, and in the longer term they will impede sustained action to mitigate climate crisis and its traumas. The people who are deprived of what is indispensable for sustaining life, whether in Yemen or South Sudan, in refugee camps in Bangladesh or in detention facilities on the U.S.-Mexico border, are not only the victims of starvation crimes in need of our aid and advocacy, but are the wind chimes that warn of approaching storms.
Continue Reading →Archives
Tags
abiy ahmed advocacy Africa African Union arms trade atrocities AU book review Bosnia conflict conflict data corruption Covid-19 elections Eritrea Ethiopia famine foreign policy gender genocide Global Arms Business Human Rights human rights memorial intervention Iraq justice Libya mass starvation mediation memorialization new wars peace political marketplace prison Saudi Arabia Somalia South Africa South Sudan Sudan Syria Tigray UK UN US Yemen